"I hate it all," she said, "but I can't help being immensely interested. Now for the part you don't understand, the part that made you think that I had given it all up. It was a bold game, and, I believe, a correct one. I dropped him—d-r-o-p, drop. Why? Simply in order that he might miss me. Of course, I risked failure. He might have shrugged his shoulders, and wondered why I had taken so much trouble to flirt with him, and gone straight away and resumed operations with Daisy. He did go straight back to Daisy, but do you think they are getting on very nicely? I don't. The more he sees of her now, the more he thinks about me. I don't say he has kind thoughts of me; he is puzzled, but he doesn't dismiss me. He is angry instead, and hurt. That shows he wants me. He will never propose to Daisy while he feels like that."
There was a short silence. Then Lady Nottingham said,—
"Do you mean you want to make him propose to you?"
"Yes."
The monosyllable came very dryly and unimportantly, as if to a perfectly commonplace inquiry. Then Lady Nottingham, in her turn, got up. Jeannie's restlessness and disquiet seemed to have transferred themselves to her.
"But it is an intolerable rôle," she said. "You cannot play with love like that. It is playing heads and tails with a man's life, or worse. You are playing with his very soul."
"And a month afterwards it will be he who will be playing with another woman's soul," said Jeannie quietly. "You cannot call it love with that sort of man. How many times has he been in love, and what has happened to it all? I am only making myself the chance woman with whom he happens to think himself in love at the time when he proposes to settle down and marry. He shall propose marriage, therefore, to me."
Lady Nottingham's air of comfort had quite left her. Her plump, contented face was puckered into unusual wrinkles.
"No, no, no," she said. "I can't imagine you act like that, Jeannie. It isn't you."
Jeannie's eyes grew suddenly sombre.